Barrow (Ditch barrow), Duntryleague, Co. Limerick
Co. Limerick |
Barrows
A field in Duntryleague, County Limerick holds a cluster of ancient burial mounds that never made it onto the Ordnance Survey's six-inch maps, and which gave up almost nothing when archaeologists finally put a spade to them.
That near-total absence of finds is itself part of what makes this site quietly compelling. Seven of the eight barrows here sit together on a raised circular platform roughly 24 metres across, an arrangement that resembles the smaller raised ring-forts recorded elsewhere in County Limerick, and which suggests the group was laid out with some deliberate spatial logic, even if the reasons behind it are now lost.
The excavation was carried out in 1936 by Seán P. Ó Ríordáin, one of the most significant figures in twentieth-century Irish archaeology, and his published account catalogued the site as 'Site b' within a group of eight barrows in the Duntryleague townland. A barrow, in this context, is a mounded earthwork raised over a burial or series of burials, often dating to the Bronze Age, though the precise date of this particular group was not established by the dig. Despite methodical excavation, the only object recovered was a single small fragment of iron, which Ó Ríordáin himself noted may be of modern origin. The platform on which the barrows sit has a diameter of approximately 24 metres, and a further circular cropmark of around 20 metres appears in the south-east corner of the field, visible in Digital Globe imagery taken between 2011 and 2013, and also on Google Earth.
The site lies in pasture, roughly 70 metres south of the townland boundary with Ballynamona. Because it sits in agricultural land and carries no marker on historic Ordnance Survey mapping, locating it on the ground requires some preparation; the cropmarks that reveal the monument's outline are most legible from aerial imagery rather than at field level, where the raised platform is subtle underfoot. Consulting Google Earth orthoimages before a visit gives the clearest sense of the layout. There is nothing to excavate or disturb, and the field is privately farmed, so any approach should be made with the usual courtesies to landowners. The monument is most visible as cropmarks during dry summers, when the differential moisture retention of the soil above buried features tends to show up in the grass.